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Perhaps one day, Data would incorporate the chip into his positronic matrix and discover what it was like to be a human being the joys and the sorrows, the delights and the disappointments, the pride and the pain. But for the time being, he took his responsibilities to others more seriously than his hopes and dreams.

It was a brave decision. I believed that at the time Data made it, and I believed it still as I sat there on the bridge of the warbird with Abby Brant at my side.

I hoped that, under similar circumstances, I would have the courage and the wisdom to make the right choice as it seemed to me Data had.

Putting the android aside for the moment, I checked my Romulan instrument panel. I found we were on the brink of the system we had made our destination. Its outermost planets were almost in our grasp.

Abby had noticed, too. “Slow to warp factor one,” she told me.

“Aye,” I replied, and did as she said.

She then asked Thadoc to set a course for the sixth planet from the sun. It was one of the two spheres we had noticed earlier that appeared capable of supporting life.

At warp one, which was equivalent to the speed of light, it would take us another couple of hours to reach the sixth planet. Still, it was prudent not to go in any faster.

One never knew what sorts of complex gravitic relationships one might find in an uncharted solar system, especially one with seventeen planets whirling around it. And as comfortable as I now felt at the helm of the warbird, it was still an alien vessel, with eccentricities that might manifest themselves at the most inopportune times.

As it happened, the time passed quickly for me, at least. The deeper we delved into the system, the more I was able to learn about the various bodies that comprised it.

For instance, the smallest worlds were either the closest to their sun or the farthest away from it a common configuration. However, what was far from common was the size of the planets in the middle distance.

In most cases, the largest world in a system is no more than thirty times the size of its smallest sister planet. As captains of spacegoing vessels, you are no doubt aware of this.

In this system, two worlds both of them gas giants drastically exceeded the traditional proportion. The ninth planet from the sun was almost two hundred times the mass of the first planet and the tenth planet was an incredible seven times as massive as the ninth.

I couldn’t help speculating. After all, when gas giants of that size collide, as the proximity of these two suggested they might someday, the greater one has a chance to grow heavy enough to begin fusion.

If that happened, it would be reborn not as a planet, but as a star, blazing within the formerly ordered bounds of an existing solar system. The term for it was super-Jovian planet ignition. Its result? Cataclysmic, in the case of systems with populated worlds.

First, the clash of the two gas giants would create new gravitic relationships. Other planets would be realigned, perhaps crash into each other or be drawn into their new sun. And those events, of course, would give rise to still further changes.

Second, whatever life may have existed on planets proximate to the new sun would be destroyed. Either they would be baked to death or perish from an excess of ultraviolet radiation.

This gave me yet another reason to glance over my shoulder at Worf every so often, it being his job to conduct long-range scans of the solar system. I wished to know if there were sentient life-forms on the planets we had made our destinations and to estimate their chances of survival in the event of a super-Jovian planet ignition.

Not because I thought we would be able to help them. That would be an impossibility, since the ignition would take place eons hence if at all. I simply had a need to know.

It was the same impulse that had compelled me to explore space in the first place. I longed to know things about distant places. No doubt, you have all felt the same way at one time